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Without referring explicitly to Marx's work on the labour theory of value of David Ricardo, the marginal utility theorist William Stanley Jevons clearly stated the main criticism of the concept of abstract labour in his 1871 treatise: "Labour affects supply, and supply affects the degree of utility, which governs value, or the ratio of exchange.
The Marxist labor theory of value has been criticised on several counts. Some argue that it predicts that profits will be higher in labor-intensive industries than in capital-intensive industries, which would be contradicted by measured empirical data inherent in quantitative analysis. This is sometimes referred to as the "Great Contradiction ...
Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory is a 1993 book by the scholar Moishe Postone released by Cambridge University Press. In the book Postone presents a reinterpretation of Marx's critical theory. The book provides a reexamination of the core categories in Marx's critique of political economy. [1] [2] [3]
Marx's theory of value differs from the classical view in his definition of labor. Marx separates it into two different types: concrete and abstract labor. [15] Concrete labor can be thought of as the unique characteristics of labor such as the work of a farmer versus a tailor. Abstract labor, on the other hand, is the general conceptualization ...
Under capitalism, according to Marx, the productive powers of labour appear as the creative power of capital. Indeed, "labour power at work" becomes a component of capital, it functions as working capital. Work becomes just work, workers become an abstract labour force, and the control over work becomes mainly a management prerogative.
According to Marx, the substance and regulator of relative product-values is human labour-time in general, labour-in-the-abstract or "abstract labour". This value (an average current replacement cost in labour-time, based on the normal productivity of producers existing at the time) exists as an attribute of the products of human labour quite ...
Mirowski (1989) for example accuses Marx of vacillating between a field theory (labour-time currently socially necessary) and a substance theory of value (embodied labour-time). This kind of criticism is due to a confusion of the process of labour in general (adding use to a product, which under capitalism equates adding value to a commodity ...
Marx concludes that as value is determined by labour, and as profit is the appropriated surplus value remaining after paying wages, that the maximum profit is set by the minimum wage necessary to sustain labour, but is in turn adjusted by the overall productive powers of labour using given tools and machines, the length of the workday, the ...